Introduction
“Ms. Elaine, what do teachers do after we leave early on Wednesdays?” one of my students asked me curiously. It dawned on me then that students and parents at Two Rivers probably did not know what the teaching staff participated in every Wednesday when students were dismissed early. In response to this question, I simply shared: “Well, the teachers become the students!” My third graders found this statement to be fascinating. The fact that teachers are always learning at Two Rivers is both fascinating to students and essential to who we are as a learning community. Teaching teams at Two Rivers participate in weekly formal professional development workshops around core practices, quarterly professional goal-setting structures, and daily informal learning conversations which all support our mission and goal: To nurture a diverse group of students to become life-long learners, who are positioned to have rich and varied options for their future. At the heart of this work is the belief that teacher learning and development works in service of every student’s learning and development toward rich and varied options for their futures.
On a parallel and connected learning path, parents are also committed learners in the Two Rivers community. Once again, the students are struck by the fact that the adults in their world still have learning and growing to do. While facilitating a task around students writing Back-to-School Night letters to their parents, I told a group of second graders that their parents would become second grade students on Back-to-School Night, where they would engage with different centers on literacy, math, and Responsive Classroom practices. Their parents would also be participating in an “evening meeting” modeled after the daily morning meetings that students start their day with to establish a welcoming and nurturing climate in which to learn. The second graders’ eyes lit up at the idea of their parents becoming students again. At Two Rivers, parent learning is core to who we are as a school. Parents participate in formal parent nights around expeditions, math, literacy, and school culture and discipline, attend parent-teacher conferences and student-support team meetings, and engage in informal learning conversations with teachers, school leadership, and fellow parents. Through all these experiences, parents have opportunities to learn and grow so that they can better partner with the school to help their children thrive toward the mission and goal.
Learning Together Through the Growth Mindset
A good school is comprised of teachers who want students to be successful in the time that students are with them, supported by parents who reinforce learning at home. A great school is created by teachers and parents who work together to help students become the type of learners that can solve any problem, creating a lifetime of success during the school years and beyond. At Two Rivers, parents and teachers strive to make a great school. They help develop students into the type of learners who have the mindset to persevere through any challenge, toward self-discovery and enduring understandings about the world. Carol Dweck calls this type of mindset a ‘growth mindset’ in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Mindsets are beliefs that individuals have about themselves that determine the way they perceive success and achievement. An individual with a ‘fixed mindset’ believes that intelligence, talent, and success is a fixed and innate trait. Because of this rigidity in self-perception, individuals with a ‘fixed mindset’ will spend most of life trying to prove success and avoiding situations in which new learning requires taking risks. On the other hand, an individual with a ‘growth mindset’ believes that intelligence, talent, and success are malleable results of hard work and intentional practice. Because of this openness and commitment to learning and stretching oneself, individuals with a ‘growth mindset’ spend life taking healthy risks toward new learning, persevering through challenges, and thriving on both successes and failures toward constant improvement.
If teachers and parents want students to develop ‘growth mindsets’ that enable life-long learning, then they need to evaluate their own mindsets. They need to ask: “Are we using a ‘fixed’ or ‘growth’ mindset when talking with our students about achievement and success?” In taking the time to ask this question of themselves, teachers and parents begin to view teaching and parenting not through the black and white lens of “success” versus “failure”, but rather through a lens that Dweck describes as being a “learner” or “non-learner.” This new way of seeing themselves, their students, and the world enables parents and teachers to cultivate success as a dynamic, on-going process, rather than sole points of achievement that you either reach or do not reach. At Two Rivers, both teachers and parents are developing their own ‘growth mindsets’, so they can be the types of learners that nurture students toward a ‘growth mindset’ in the 21st century.
PART 1 of The Two Rivers University Series: Teachers as Learners
Why is teacher learning so important?
In a meta-study of what makes the most difference in student learning, John Hattie talks about the power of “visible learning.” In looking at teacher impact, he says: “Teachers who are students of their own effects are teachers who are most influential in raising students’ achievement.” As Hattie states, teachers need to become students in order for their students to learn and achieve. They specifically need to study how their practice impacts students’ progress, and continuously demonstrate clarity around what outcomes their students are making progress towards.
At Two Rivers, teachers are committed to creating and facilitating tasks that help all students make progress not solely toward basic skills and knowledge as measured by standardized testing, but toward developing rigorous 21st century cognitive and social skills. In The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane call these skills expert thinking and complex communication. Expert thinking involves the cognitive ability to apply a strong fund of knowledge, construct relationships and patterns between disparate sets of knowledge, and be meta-cognitive about one’s problem-solving process to approach any type of problem and create multiple solutions. Complex communication involves the social ability to collaborate with diverse groups of people through exchanging vast amounts of information, build understanding and cultivate trust among very different perspectives, and negotiate outcomes to create multiple solutions. Teachers at Two Rivers need to continuously learn about what achievement in the 21st century needs to look like for students, with expert thinking and complex communication at the heart of how we define student success. With this larger goal in mind, teachers build and sharpen their practice with effective instructional strategies that support this type of achievement for all students.
How do teachers learn at Two Rivers?
In order to actualize the mission for every student in the 21st century, Two Rivers prioritizes teacher learning around the core practices of data-driven instruction, modeling, reflection, and collaboration.
Data-Driven Instruction and Differentiation
At Two Rivers, teachers take the ‘all’ part of our mission very seriously. Our daily work is driven by the understanding that our students come to us with very different needs, and the core belief that every student needs and deserves the same opportunities to access rich and varied options for their futures. Teachers continuously learn about how to differentiate in the classroom, so that instruction creates different pathways for students of different starting places to all access the same larger conceptual understandings.
To develop their habits of using data to drive instruction toward expert thinking and complex communication, teachers have focused on using a broader definition of data (not just standardized assessments but also on-going data from performance tasks in math, reading, writing, social studies, and science). Teachers at Two Rivers participate in a structure called “data-analysis-strategy” loop, in which they go through multiple cycles of assessing, collecting and analyzing data, planning for differentiation and next steps of teaching, and implementing changes in instruction to create growth for all students. They are committed to teaching toward expert thinking and complex communication outcomes, using a broader ranger of student data, and a focus on the instructional strategy of using data to create and implement differentiation through flexible groups. With this commitment, teachers continue to learn how to better articulate, respond to, and shape the learning stories of their students in the 21st century.
Modeling
Last year, teachers at Two Rivers participated in monthly math professional development workshops on Wednesday afternoons. While the main purpose of the math workshops was to build staff love and capacity for math, teachers also had the opportunity to become learners and be meta-cognitive about their learning. They watched an effective model from our instructional guide, Jeff Heyck-Williams, of facilitating problem-based tasks around representing and communicating mathematical thinking. Through becoming students themselves, teachers were able to develop a more acute understanding and empathy for their own students when given open-ended tasks that required openness to learning and perseverance on the student’s part, and skillful teaching, questioning, and coaching on the teacher’s part. They were able to use both the content and process of the math professional development workshops to help them design rigorous learning experiences for their own students, in and outside of math.
In addition to professional development around math and problem-based task teaching, teachers at Two Rivers learn through modeling and inquiry in learning labs. Learning labs involve teams of teachers who are interested in researching a focused question of practice together. A host teacher turns his or her classroom into a learning lab and invites fellow teachers to watch a learning experience through the lens of a guiding question posed by the host teacher. Participants observe, take notes around the question of practice, raise their own questions, and debrief together with the host teacher after the observation. Rather than promoting a model of a ready made answer to the question of practice, learning labs give participants an opportunity to construct an answer together, achieving new insights that will inform everyone’s practice. In the past, Two Rivers teachers have participated in learning labs, facilitated by Jill Clark, our 8th grade social studies teacher, and Kathleen Kennedy, one of our first grade teachers and a teacher leader. The learning labs provided rich opportunities for teachers to investigate key practices such as collaboration in early childhood writing, meta-cognitive thinking in reading and math in the upper grades, and the impact of discourse in deepening discipline-specific conceptual understanding. Through each of these lab experiences, teachers not only learn active pedagogical strategies to take back to the classroom, but also develop an important growth mindset that drives their life-long learning as educators.
Reflection
Peter F. Drucker, American educator and writer, expressed this eloquent truth about reflection: “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come more effective action.” At Two Rivers, teachers are constantly engaged in the rhythms of dynamic action and ‘balcony’ reflection time, in which we carve out formal space to zoom out and take stock of the larger picture. While every individual reflects in different and personal ways, teachers at Two Rivers reflect collectively on where we have been in our practice and where we are headed. As life-long learners themselves, they continue to evolve in their practice and deepen their commitment to mission-driven teaching.
Within the rhythms of every school year, the dance between reflection and effective action starts before students step through the doors for their first day of school. Two Rivers has a rigorous three week orientation for staff in August, in which teachers across grade-levels and disciplines build a culture of learning together, build collective understanding around key instructional practices that support our mission and goal for every student, plan scopes and sequences in collaborative teams, and reflect on the essential take-aways of their learning before students arrive. At the end of every orientation, teachers reflect on their personal learning through a collective gallery walk experience. The gallery walk is comprised of all the documents of learning created over the course of orientation.
In this past summer’s gallery walk, teachers reflected on professional development orientation documents related to our school-wide data story, unit planning and problem-based task teaching, culture and Responsive Classroom core practices, and pillars of collaboration such as the growth mindset and using difficult conversations as learning opportunities. As they often have their students do, the teachers synthesized their reflections into the “big rocks” they wanted to remember during the busy school year in a representation of their choice. They either chose to create a visual representation that would be housed somewhere visible and accessible in their classrooms, or write letters to their future selves that would be given back to them in February, a typically stressful time of the school year. This intentional reflection drives the pulse of instructional decisions and significant shifts in thinking and planning throughout the year, as well as traction around practices that make the most difference in students’ learning. At the end of the school year in June, teachers at Two Rivers close out the year the way they started-with a synthesis of how their mindsets and practices have changed. Teachers wrote their own “change stories”, which articulated how a change in their pedagogy impacted the learning experiences they created for students. In the rhythms of reflection and action, teachers at Two Rivers learn how to be meta-cognitive about their own practice and share in the leadership of our work.
Collaboration
At Two Rivers, the staff practices 8 key habits that help us work toward the mission and goal for every student. These habits are trust, respect, creativity, flexibility, kindness, caring, commitment, and collaboration. Out of these habits, effective collaboration becomes the result of practicing the other habits consistently, especially in challenging circumstances. Collaboration is the heartbeat of the Two Rivers community. Since it is so essential to how we learn and work together, Two Rivers teachers spend intentional time learning about the process of collaboration itself.
There are also many structures built into each day and the school year, that formalize collaboration as an on-going, focused process that produces results for our students. For example, teachers in each grade-level team participate in common planning time once a week with an administrative partner. This time enables both the lead and special education teachers of the same grade level to collaboratively plan units, lessons, and assessments, analyze data together and determine next steps, as well as problem-solve toward shared solutions. Common planning time gives teachers sanctioned time to ensure that all students access to the same learning opportunities across classes, specifically bringing together the perspectives of the special educator and the general educator. It connects one teaching partner who is passionate and skilled in a certain aspect of the mission to another teaching partner who is committed to a different but complementary aspect of the mission. Together, the teaching team creates a deeper understanding and more effective implementation of practices that best serve our students--much greater than any one individual could have achieved if teaching on an island.
While common planning time provides teachers a collective learning and planning structure, our six week goal setting structure gives teachers a way to grow their individual practice over the course of an instructional year and in service of long-term development. Each lead teacher meets with our principals, Maggie Bello and Dave Philhower, to collaboratively determine what his or her personal professional goals should be in six week cycles. In this supervision and evaluation structure, teachers learn how to set focused goals for themselves, work toward accountability through collecting and bringing back data as evidence of goal mastery, and use the Two Rivers effective teacher rubric to continuously self-assess and work toward improvements in practice. This type of collaborative goal-setting cultivates a habit of mind for teachers to continuously evolve as they better understand the needs of their diverse student populations. Between goal-setting meetings and within the 6 week periods, teachers connect with resources such as working with instructional guides, participating in off-site professional development, and/or connecting with fellow teachers who have expertise in their specific goal area. Teachers not only learn new instructional strategies and approaches to planning, assessing, and differentiating, but also learn how to continuously set goals for themselves that build traction in essential pedagogy which serves all students.
Closing
During interviews with prospective teachers, we often liken our professional development to an on-going university approach, fondly calling it ‘Two Rivers University.’ When we stop and consider all the ways that teachers learn here, the name actually captures who we are and what we do quite aptly! In our ‘Two Rivers University,’ the threads of theory and practice constantly meet, weaving a beautiful tapestry of learning for every teacher and student. We work to create an exceptional school, one in which teachers and students travel together on an on-going journey of meaningful, joyful, and rigorous learning.
Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of the Two Rivers University Series: Parents as Learners and Parents and Teachers Learn Together
